12.6.12

Other City Sidewalks: West Palm Beach

They
say that walking in Florida is like jazz dancing about bad
architecture. It’s an inherently ugly clash between irreconcilable
enterprises, and you have to improvise continually to get where you’re
going.* To my bitter eyes, Florida is an incarnation of baby boom fantasy, the great
20th century escape valve, which is why the automobile is almost
the only ingredient found in the stew. A pedestrian in Florida is a
vegetarian at a steakhouse, an ice cream truck in January, a bicycle at
the Auto Show.

In last year's big study on pedestrian safety released by the DC advocacy group, Transportation for America,
Florida swept the top four spots on the "Most Dangerous Metro Areas"
list. It was the kind of dominance not seen since the '92 Dream Team.
It’s almost as if Florida's cities were intentionally designed to kill
people on foot. (That suspicion, by the way, lingers in one’s mind when
contemplating the number of old people who have self-marooned along the
coasts, and how the locals must feel about this demographic.)

[Typical sidewalk.]

[Typical sidewalk cyclist.]

[Typical bus stop.]

[Typical sidewalk denzien, typically with a cardboard sign.]

A
lot of people might assume that nobody walks in Florida because it’s
too hot and humid outside, and yes, there is truth to be found here.
Just walking around in early May (!), I found my shirt drenched from the
humid air that surrounds you like fog. But much like Minnesotans'
insipid whining about winter, there are ways of dressing, times of
walking, and designs for cities that minimize the heat. Just like in
Minnesota, weather becomes an excuse for depressing sloth. (It's too
hot, so we might as well stay on the couch instead of opening the front door.) The truth is that the weather
is a convenient excuse, an atmospheric coincidence that
exacerbates the basic problem: walking in Florida is demoralizing
because most every part of every city is an alienating unbeautiful
shadeless inconvenient noisy dirty deathtrap.

I stayed in West
Palm Beach for a few nights at a hotel located at least five miles out
of downtown in the middle of a corporate office park near a busy road
leading to a freeway in a semi-dicey part of town. Apart from the usual
mélange of bad urbanism – the narrow treeless curb-edge sidewalks, the
wide four-lane 45mph roads with beg buttons, the monotonous land use –
West Palm Beach added something new to the mix that I hadn’t
even seen in pedestrian purgatories like Dallas. In Florida, the curving road hierarchy combined such that, to get
almost anywhere on foot with any kind of ‘crow flies’ efficiency, you had to cut through a whole bunch of strange spaces. Because the actual
sidewalks are primarily ornamental (except for people with minimal
mobility), they follow the automobile orientation and wind back
and forth around parking lots and development moats. Those kind of streets might
look nice in an architectural design, but become a persistent problem
if you want to actually get anywhere on foot as fast as
possible (say, to get to the store before it closes, or to catch the
bus stop).

For example, take
a look at this route from my crappy hotel in the office park
to the commuter rail station a bit over a mile away, given to me via
Google maps:

[The sidewalk route I was supposed to have walked.]

Despite
the fact that the train station is relatively close, the 'on foot'
route is 2.5 miles long due to all the freeways and curving
inaccessible roads. (Given that the commonly cited distance for
how far people are willing to walk is a scant .5 miles, the station is
prohibitively out of reach.)

Except that, if you
actually walk this route there are a bunch of 'desire path'
possibilities for cutting time off your journey. You can cut through the
parking lot, cut through the hedge behind the gas station, and (most
importantly) cut through the huge parking lot at the abandoned Jai-Alai
“fronton,” which cuts at least a half mile off your trip. (Fronton, by
the way, is the Basque word that means "abandoned 500,000 sq ft
building.")

[The 'desire' route I actually walked.]

This
kind of landscape means that anyone with a head on their shoulders and
feet on their legs improvises and short-cuts through the acres of wasted
space that pepper the South Florida landscape. There are desire paths
everywhere, stretching through the wide lawns, padding down the thick
tropical grass, finding crannies in every fenced-off building cluster,
winding through the empty lots of undeveloped half-built sheds,
wandering through the acres of parking. I did all of those things on my
wanderings as a matter of course. It became almost a secret game. Could I
figure out a secret path to that would cut my walk in half?
Which hedgerow had a secret door that would deliver me to the next impassible
road? If I hypotenuse through this parking lot, could I get through the fence on the other side? I cut through this abandoned-looking building, will I get shot for
trespassing?

[Your typical South Florida pedestrian, cutting through back yards.]

[Desire path to a parking lot.]

[Desire path through a gas station backyard & office park hedge.]

[The best shortcuts are through empty parking lots.]

[Half-built developments also make for good shortcuts.]

[Desire path by gas station.]

[Security guards watching feral cats at the transit station.]

Variations
on this last question kept popping up in my head as I played the
improvisational game of ‘walking in Florida.’ I bought some
Skittles to keep me going, and kept thinking about the Trayvon Martin tragedy,
and how different my experience likely might have been if I was a young
black male. (Instead, I was in my Florida tourist outfit: khaki shorts,
Velcro sneakers, and the most pastel cruise ship shirt I could find in
my closet.) Others
have already pointed out how bad urban design was partly responsible
for the incident, that a pedestrian in Florida is an aberration who does
not belong. Designing your streets only for autos turns pedestrians,
bus riders, and the elderly into criminals, obstacles, or pinatas. Urban
design is always political.

[The abandoned Palm Beach Jai-Alai fronton.]

[Slow old man crosses the street while someone in a Ferarri revs their V-12.]

[The lovely covered sidewalks of Clematis Street.]

[Nightlife along Clematis Street.]

Of course, not all of South Florida makes you feel like cursed hybrid
of the frog in Frogger, the duck in Duck Hunt, and wandering aimlessly
in Zelda. That’s only 94% of the landscape; the other 6% is quite nice.
For example, Palm Beach and West Palm Beach (they’re different) each
have a few blocks of old downtown with lovely sidewalks, awnings and
balconies, and some small businesses in mixed-use environments. West
Palm Beach even has three blocks of night life, where seemingly all the
bars in the entire city are clustered in a tiny little dollop of town
along Clematis Street. Each of these towns (and they are
different) has an arcade-style shopping area where you can stroll along a
cool canopied sidewalk and window shop, or sit on a bench in the shade
and watch impossible clouds go by. West Palm Beach even has small districts
of more walkable older homes, with porches and sidewalks. (Palm Beach,
on the other hand, is for the wealthy. All the homes are magnificent,
huge, and covered by porches and decks. Also, they're all protected by
walls. Yeah, they're different in the same way that Old Navy and J. Crew are different.) Even in Florida, there are tiny islands of urban space, remnants
of the early 20th century that predate our air conditioned escape from
reality.

[CityPlace, the covered mixed-use shopping development in West Palm Beach.]

But
its precisely these urban tidbits that throw a spotlight on the
inequality of the urban fabric. These pleasant patches only prove the
problems of the rest of the landscape, how impossibly restricted and
undignified the alternatives. The landscape seems to me a fractured
confusion of compounds missing continuity. Measure or
connection between places has been replaced by independent disjointed bubbles, each
sufficient to itself, forming some complex system the logic of which
escapes me. There is the Florida of the coasts and the
red Italian sports cars, fortifications of power and money connected by airplanes, freeways, and yachts. There is the spectacle Florida,
manufactured and reflected around the hemisphere, a polished portrait
hawked as a poultice, place-experience sold like a smooth cruise.
There’s the faded Florida of the aging, with cheap fancy houses and
golf carts and chrome Cadillacs. And in between all these complex
networks stretched across the landscape, you’ll find a regular place, a
city of people trying to get to work or go to school, having to make
their way across an extreme landscape.

[An armadillo on an onramp.]

And
you can tell that Florida is beautiful underneath the concrete. You can feel the old compelling land of
swamps and sargasso just underneath the surface. You find an armadillo
on an on-ramp or a snail crawling cross an ashtray and you realize
that you're not actually trapped in a postcard, that there's a volatile
world squirming in the grasp of Modernist fantasia. If you walk far
enough you’ll find the ocean, a sublime sight that not even our
collective American hallucination can mangle.** Florida's ocean is the
great equalizer. Everyone is insignificant beside the infinite Atlantic.
The beach greets everyone with the same unintelligible hypnotism and a
seashell between your toes, its power so much more than anything mastered or mustered. It threatens and beckons and murmurs. The ocean
makes the walk seem almost worth it.